The Wolf of Wall Street

Cinema

As a director, Martin Scorsese has often dealt with the less salubrious parts of American society, the hoodlums of Mean Streets, the pimps and drug dealers around Times Square in Taxi Driver, organised crime in Brooklyn or Las Vegas in Goodfellas or Casino. Allied to his mastery of technique is the humour and (although his detractors claim this is harder to discern) humanity that make his characters, even the most violent criminals, fascinating. Yet, Scorsese is also, famously, a man who aspired to priesthood in the Catholic Church; even now in his eighth decade he still refers to this, not infrequently. When the mobster-turned-informant Henry Hill opines in voice-over at the opening of Goodfellas, after a scene of revoltingly botched carnage, “As far back as I can remember, I alway